Transcript

For some of the work that we've been doing with adolescents, for instance who have immigrated to a new country, and when they are older their challenge is that they very quickly need to learn academic language. So, if they dont know academic words, the kind of words that are used in high school, whether it is math or physics or history, doesn't matter, it may be hard for them to comprehend the text.

It's important to teach the important words that are in the text that children who are immigrants are not familiar with. They may not do well, not because they are not able to do well, but because they are not familiar with the words. 

The other thing that we have to take into consideration is: what is the educational background of the child? In one case they come from a refugee camp and they haven't gone to school on a regular basis. In another case the child has gone to private schools with the best teachers in their country. Well those children will be very different, they're the same age maybe  but in one case the child has not gone to school on a regular basis because of the refugee camp. So their vocabulary and their conceptual knowledge haven't been developed even in their first language so they have little to draw on. In the second case, they've gone to school where they've gone on a regular basis, they have a lot of concepts that they've developed at school in their home language and all they need to do then is what we call transfer. They can transfer; they can draw on their knowledge and bring it into the second language. So those two are different and they have different educational needs.